Projects

I think I might never manage to make much headway into my reading if I didn’t set myself projects to complete–goals a little closer than “read everything ever written” and a little farther than “read the next page.” I have the same difficulty with watching movies or pretty much anything else. Without a project that I can see myself making progress on, I’m not sure I’d ever actually do anything.

I’ve actually got one big project, which I’ve called Kilobook. The current reading list for that project doesn’t actually contain a thousand books, but I figure it will probably grow to around that size by the time I’ve added all the things I think really ought to be in it. The purpose of my Kilobook project, you see, is to read a large selection of works in the Western canon, from Plato and Aristotle and the Bible to Pride and Prejudice and Ulysses and Great Expectations. I’m probably going to cut off entries in that project somewhere around the middle of the twentieth century–anything newer than than, and there just hasn’t been enough time to decide what’s a classic and what’s a passing fad.

I’ve got lots of smaller projects, as well. Most of them, I’ve yet to begin, though some I’ve made a little progress on.

Here I’ll collect a list of all my ongoing and future projects, so that I can select one when I’ve got the urge to read something, but don’t have anything in particular in mind.

Book Projects

• Kilobook
• The Walt Disney Fun-to-Read Library
• Newbery Medal
• Caldecott Medal
• Carnegie Medal in Literature
• Coretta Scott King Award
• Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize
• Kate Greenaway Medal
• Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal
• Margaret Edwards Award
• Mark Twain Readers Award
• Sequoyah Book Award
• Goosebumps books
• Choose Your Own Adventure books
• Persnickety Snark’s Top 100 YA Novels, 2010
• The Baby-Sitters Club series
• Berenstain Bears series

Movie Projects

• National Film Registry
• IMDB Top 100
• Works of Kurosawa
• Marx Brothers films
• Disney animated canon

Television Projects

• Star Trek episode reviews
• Aladdin episode reviews
• Buffy episode reviews
• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic episode reviews
• Avatar: The Last Airbender episode reviews

Carnegie Medal in Literature